Once
again, we’re focusing on how companies are adapting to the new style
of IT to improve IT performance and deliver better user experiences,
and business results. This time, we’re coming to you directly from the
recent HP Discover Conference in Barcelona.

Our next innovation case study interview highlights how NNIT uses HP Cloud Service Automation (CSA) to improve their deployment of IT applications and data, and to provide higher overall efficiency. To learn more, we’re joined by Jesper Bagh, IT Architect and cloud expert at NNIT, based in Copenhagen. Welcome, Jesper.

Jesper Bagh: Thank you very much, Dana.

Gardner:
So tell us a little about your company and what you do. Then, we’ll get
into some of the problems and solutions that you've been tasked with
resolving.

Bagh: NNIT is a service provider
located in Denmark. We have offices around the world, China,
Philippines, Czech Republic, and the United States. We’re 2,200
employees globally and we're a subsidiary of Novo Nordisk, the pharmaceutical company known for making insulin.

Gardner: IT Architect, that’s an interesting
title. Tell us what you do and what you were doing before you achieved
that rank. What are your job responsibilities?

Bagh:
My responsibility is to ensure for the company that business goals can be
delivered through functional requirements, and in turning the functional
requirements into projects that can be delivered by the organization.

Gardner:
I know that the IT architect and cloud architect individuals are in
high demand in a lot of companies. Tell us how you’ve evolved your
thinking toward a cloud deployment, and explain how
you are using HP CSA to accomplish that.

Full suite

Bagh:
We embarked on CSA together with HP back in 2010. Back then, CSA consisted of many different software applications. It wasn't really
complete software back then. Now, it’s a full suite of software.

It has helped us to show to our internal groups -- and our customers -- that we have services in the cloud. For us it
has been a tremendous journey to show that you can deliver these services
fully automatically, and by running them well, we can gain great efficiency.

Gardner:
And has the ability to be more service-oriented in your cloud
activities filtered back into more of IT? Are you extending this
thinking about service, catalog, and delivery into other aspects of IT,
in addition to cloud?

Bagh: We’re a wall-to-wall, full-service provider. So we provide both application development management and
infrastructure outsourcing. Cloud is just one aspect that we’re
delivering services on. Before we did the cloud project, we started off
by doing service-portfolio management and cataloging of our services, trying to standardize the services that we have on the shelf ready for our customers.

That
allowed us to put offerings into a cloud, and to show the process of
standardizing of services, doing cloud well, and of focusing on the dedicated
customers. We still have customers using our facility management who are not able
to leverage cloud services because of compliance or regulatory demands.

We have roughly over 10,000 services in our data centers.
We’re trying now to broaden the capabilities of cloud delivery to the
rest of the infrastructure so that we get a more competitive edge. We’re
able to deliver better quality, and the end users -- at the end of the
day -- get their services faster.

Back in the good old days, developers were in one silo and
operations were in another silo. Now, we see a mix of resources, both
in operations and in development.

Gardner:
Has this clearly benefited your speed-to-value when it comes to new
applications. How do your developer and test and automation
individuals react to this?

Bagh: The adaption
of automation is an ongoing journey. I imagine other
companies have also had the opportunity of adapting to a new breed of
software, and a new life in automation and orchestration. What we see is
that the traditional operations divisions now suddenly get developers
trying to comprehend what they mean, and trying to have them work
together to deliver operations automatically.

Back in
the good old days, developers were in one silo, and operations were in
another silo. Now, we see a mix of resources -- both in operations and in
development. So the organizational change management derived from
automation projects is key. We started up, when we did service
cataloging and service portfolio management, by doing organizational
change to see if this could fit into our vision.

Gardner:
Now, a lot of people these days like to measure things. It’s a very
data-driven era. Have you been able to develop any metrics of how your
service automation and cloud-infrastructure developments have shown
results, whether it’s productivity benefits or speeds and feeds? Have
you measured this as a time-to-value or a time-to-delivery benefit? What have you
come up with?

Value-add

Bagh: As part of the cloud project, we did two things. We did infrastructure as a service (IaaS),
but we also did a value add on IaaS. We were able to deliver qualified
IaaS to the life science industry fully compliant. That alone, in the
traditional infrastructure, would have taken us weeks or months to
deliver servers because of all the process work involved. When we did
the CSA and the GxP
Cloud, we were able to deliver the same server within a matter of
hours. So that’s a measurable efficiency that is highly recognized.

Gardner:
For other organizations that are also grappling with these issues and
trying to go over organization and silo boundaries for improvement in
collaboration, do you have any words of advice? Now that you've been
doing this for some time and at that key architect level, which I think
is really important, what thoughts do you have that you could share with
others, lessons learned perhaps?

Bagh: The
lesson learned is that having senior management focus on the entire process is
key. Having the organization recognized is a matter of change
management. So communication is key. Standardization before automation
is key.

You need to start out by doing your
standardization of your services, doing the real architectural work,
identifying which components you have and which components you don't
have, and matching them up. It’s trying to do all the Lego blocks in
order to build the house. That’s key. The parallel that I always use is
there is nothing different for me as an architect than there is for an
architect building a house.

The next step for us is to be more proactive than reactive in our
monitoring and reporting capabilities, because we want to be more
transparent to our customers.

Gardner: Looking to the future, are there other aspects of service
delivery, perhaps ways in which you could gather insights into what's
happening across your infrastructure and the results, that end users are
seeing through the applications? Do you have any thoughts about where
the next steps might be?

Bagh: The next step for
us is to be more transparent to our customers. So the vision is now we
can deliver services fully automatically. We can run them semi-automatically. We will still do funny stuff from time to time that you
need to keep your eyes on. But in order for us to show the value, we
need to report on it.

The next step for us is to be
more proactive than reactive in our monitoring and reporting
capabilities, because we want to be more transparent to our customers.
We have a policy called Open and Honest Value-Adding. From that, we want
to show our customers that if we can deliver a service fully
automatically and standardized, they know what they get because they see
it in a catalog. Then, we should be able to report on it live for the
users.

Gardner: Very good. I’m afraid we will
have to leave it there. We’ve been learning about how NNIT is improving
their delivery and performance of applications through the use of an
important cloud-service automation technologies.

Gardner: So a big thank you to our guest, Jesper Bagh, IT Architect and Cloud Expert at NNIT, based in Copenhagen. Thank you so much.

Bagh: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner:
And thank you too to our audience for joining this special new style of
IT discussion coming to you directly from the HP Discover 2013
Conference in Barcelona.

I’m Dana Gardner, Principal
Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of HP
Sponsored Discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next
time.

Transcript
of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how cloud service automation can
improve deployment of IT applications and delivery for higher
efficiency. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2014. All rights
reserved.

Over the past five years, the impetus for cloud adoption has been primarily about advancing the IT infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS)
fabric or utility model, and increasingly seeking both applications and
discrete IT workload support services from Internet-based providers.

But
as adoption of these models has unfolded, it's become clear that the impacts and implications of cloud commerce are much broader and much
more of a benefit to the business as a whole as an innovation engine,
even across whole industries.

Recent research shows us
that business leaders are now eager to move beyond cost and
efficiency gains from cloud to reap far greater rewards, to in essence,
rewrite the rules of commerce.

We're here today with a
panel of experts and practitioners of cloud to unpack how modern
enterprises have a unique opportunity to gain powerful new means to
greater business outcomes. So with that, please join me in welcoming our
guests, Ed Cone, the Managing Editor of Thought Leadership at Oxford Economics. Welcome, Ed.

Ed Cone: Good morning, Dana.

Gardner: We're here as well with Ralf Steinbach, Director of Global Software Architecture at Groupe Danone, the French food multinational based in Paris. Welcome, Ralf.

Ralf Steinbach: Good afternoon, because it is afternoon here.

Gardner: And we're here also with Bryan Acker, Culture Change Ambassador for the TELUS Transformation Office at TELUS, the Canadian telecommunications firm. Welcome, Bryan.

Bryan Acker: Thanks for having me.

Gardner: And we're also here with Tim Minahan, Chief Marketing officer for SAP Cloud and Line of Business Solutions. Welcome, Tim.

Tim Minahan: Hey, Dana, it's great to be here.

Gardner: It seems to me that business, at its simplest definition,
is a series of inputs transformed by processes and value adds, and then a
set of outputs.

Now that's grossly simplified, but
this is all governed internally by systems of record, cycles of learning
and, many times, innovative processes, based on intellectual property
and research. Ed, you've been doing recent research there at Oxford
Economics, and so how is cloud now able to address this entire business
meta process, rather than just some discrete parts like systems of
record?

Questions on the cloud

Cone:
Dana, we did a survey for SAP last year, and that became the basis for
this program. We went out to 200 executives around the world and asked
them that question, not quite so elegantly phrased as you did, but "What
are you doing in the cloud? Are you still looking at it for just
process speed, efficiency, and cost cutting?"

The numbers that came back were really strong in
terms of actually being a part of the business function. Beyond those
basics, cloud is very much part of the daily reality of companies today.

We
saw that the leading expectation for cloud to deliver significant
improvement was in productivity, innovation, and revenue generation. So
obviously process, speed, efficiency, and cost cutting are still very
important to business, but people are looking to cloud for new lines of
business, entering new markets, and developing new products.

In
this program, what we did was take that information and go out to
executives for live interviews to dive deep into how cloud has become
the new engine of business, how these expectations are being met at
companies around the world.

Gardner: And we'll
be speaking to some of those in just a few moments at Danone and TELUS,
but before we get to the nitty-gritty of how you do this, I'm still
interested in why cloud commerce is evolving to a higher value. So Tim at SAP
Cloud, how you are using this shift? Are businesses doing this
intentionally, or are they basically being forced by what's happening
around them?

Minahan: Increasingly, as was just indicated, businesses are moving beyond the IT efficiencies and the total cost of ownership (TCO) benefits of the cloud, and the cloud certainly offers benefits in those areas.

But really what's driving adoption, what's moving us
to this tipping point, is that now, by some estimates, 75 percent of all
new investments are going into the cloud or hybrid models.
Increasingly, businesses are viewing the cloud as a platform for
innovation and entirely new engagement models with their customers,
their employees, their suppliers and partners, and in some cases, to
create entirely new business models.

Just think about what cloud has done for our personal lives. Who would have thought that Apple, a few years ago, would be used to run your home. This is the Apple Home
concept that allows you to monitor and manage all of your devices --
your air-conditioning, your alarm, music, and television -- remotely
through the cloud.

Gardner:
Right, and it seems that one of these benefits is that we can cross
boundaries of time, space geography, what have you, very easily, almost
transparently, and that requires new thinking in order to take advantage
of that.

Bryan, at TELUS as Culture of Change
Ambassador, are you part of the process for helping people think
differently and therefore be able to exploit what cloud enables?

Flexible work schedule

Acker:
One hundred percent. It's actually a great segue, because at TELUS we
have a flexible work arrangement, where we want 70 percent of our
employees to be working either from home or remotely. What that means is
we have to have the tools and the culture in place that people
understand, that they can access data and relevant information, wherever
they are.

It doesn't matter if they're at home, like I am
today, on the road, or at a client site, they need to be able to get the
information to provide the best customer experience and provide the
right answer at the right time.

So by switching from
some of the great tools we already offered, because collaboration is
part of TELUS’s cultural DNA, we've actually been able to tear down
silos we didn't even know we were creating.

We were
trying to provide all the tools, but now people have an end-to-end view
of every record for customers, as well as employees and the
collaboration involving courses and learning opportunities. They have
access to everything when they need it and they can take ownership of
the customer experience or even their own career, which is fantastic for
us.

Gardner: Ralf, at Danone, as Director of
Global Software Architecture, you clearly have your feet on the path
and you've seen how things have evolved. Do you see the shift to cloud
as a modest evolution, or is this something that changes the
game?

Steinbach: We've been looking at
cloud for quite sometime now. We've started several projects in the
cloud, mainly in two areas. One involves the supporting functions of our
business which is HR, travel expenses, and mail. There, we see a huge
advantage of using standardized services in the cloud.

In these functions we do not need any specifics. The
cloud comes standard and you can not change, as you can with SAP
systems. You can't adapt the code. But that is one area where we think
there's value in using cloud applications.

The other area where we really see the cloud as valued is in our digital marketing
initiatives. There, we really need the flexibility of the cloud.
Digital marketing is changing every day. There's a lot of innovation
there and there the cloud gives us flexibility in terms of resources
that we need to support that. And, the innovation cycles of our
providers are much faster than they would be on premises. These are the
two main areas where we use the cloud today.

Cone:
Ralf, it was interesting to me, when I was reading through the
transcript of your interview and working on the case studies we did,
that it is even changing business models. It's allowing Danone to go
straight to the consumer, where previously your customer had been the
retailer. Cloud in new geographic markets is letting you reach straight
to the end user, the end buyer.

Digital marketing

Steinbach:
That's what I meant when I talked about digital marketing. Today, all
consumer product goods company like Danone are looking at connecting to
their consumers and not to the retailers as in the past. We're really
focusing on the end-consumer, and the cloud offers us new possibilities
to do that, whether it is via mobile applications or websites and so on.

One
thing that's important is the flexibility of the systems, because we
don't know how many consumers we'll address. It can be a few, but it
could be over a million. So we need to have a flexible architecture, and
on-premise we could not manage that.

Gardner:
It's interesting. When I listen to Ralf, I'm hearing agility and also
speed, speed of innovation. They can let those cloud services providers
be in the vanguard of things like energy, facilities, the process
speeds, the speeds and feeds, the nuts and bolts. The cloud makers are really in the
vanguard because their business model is based on a cost of operations
where they are going to seek those efficiencies constantly.

So,
Ed, the concept of speed seems to come up more and more. We're talking
about speed of innovation, agility, direct lines of communication to
customers and, of course, also supply-chain direct communication speed as well. How prominent did you see speed and the need for speed in business in your recent research?

We're really focusing on the end consumer, and the cloud offers us new possibilities to do that.

Cone:
Well, speed was important and it's speed across different dimensions.
It's speed to enter a new market or it's speed to collaborate within
your own company, within your own organization.

This
idea of taking IT and pushing it out to the people, to the customer, and
really to the line of business allows them to have intimate contact and
to move quickly, but also to break down these barriers of geography.

We did a case study with another large company, Hero,
which is a large maker of motorcycles and two wheeled vehicles in
India. What they're doing with cloud- enabled customer-facing technology
is moving their service operation outside of dealerships into the
countryside, out across India. They go to parks and they set up what
they call service camps.

There, the speed element is
the speed and the convenience with which you are able to get your bike
serviced, and that's having a large measurable impact on their business.
So it is speed, but it is speed across multiple dimensions.

Gardner:
Tim, another thing that Ralf mentioned was standardization, of having
consistency in how the services are delivered to them so the business
can innovate at a higher abstraction.

It seems to me
that the cloud provider and their role in this, is at a higher
abstraction as well. As a provider of cloud services yourself with SAP,
how are you seeing the ability to standardize and make consistent and
automate processes and services in a way that then speeds up the general
business objectives?

New innovation

Minahan:
At the core, the cloud is really all about
unlocking new innovations, providing agility in the business, allowing
companies to be able to adapt their processes very, very quickly, and
even create entirely new engagement models, and that's what we are
seeing.

It's
one that ushers in a new era of innovation for the business, where we
can enable new engagement models with customers, employees, suppliers,
and other partners.

We've heard some great examples here, but some others were very similar to the experience that Danone has seen. T-Mobile is leveraging the cloud not to replace its traditional systems of records,
but to extend them with the cloud, to create a new model for social
care, helping monitor conversations on its brand, and engage customer
issues across multiple channels.

This convergence of cloud, big data, analytics, mobile and social, and
business networks really ushers in ultimately a new paradigm for
business computing.

So not just their traditional
support channels, but Twitter and Facebook, where these conversations
are happening and really it is empowered them to deliver what has become
a phenomenal kind of “Cinderella-worst-to-first” story for customer
support and satisfaction.

Now, they're seeing first
time resolution rates that have gone from the low teens to greater than
94 percent. Obviously, that has a massive impact on customer
satisfaction and renewals and is all powered by not throwing out the
systems that they've used so long, but by extending them with the cloud
to achieve new innovations and then drive new engagement models.

Gardner: Tim, another factor here, in a sense, levels the playing field. When you move to the cloud, small-to-medium-sized enterprises (SMBs)
can enjoy the same benefit that you just described for example from
T-Mobile. Are you at SAP seeing any movement in terms of the size or
type of organizations that can exploit these new benefits? Is it
something only for big guy?

Minahan: No, it
certainly isn't something only for the big guy. Although what's
interesting, Dana, is that you and I have been around this industry for
quite some time and the original thought was that the cloud was the big,
democratized computing power.

It allowed SMBs to get
the same level of applications and infrastructure support that their
larger competitors have had for years. That's certainly true, but it is
really the large enterprises that have been aggressively adopting this
on an equal pace with their SMBs.

All sizes of companies

The
cloud is being used to not only accelerate process efficiency and
productivity, but to unlock innovations for all sized companies. Large
enterprises like UPS, Deutsche Bank,
and Danone are using cloud-based business applications. In the case of
UPS and Deutsche Bank, they're using business networks to extend their
traditional supply chain and financial systems to collaborate better
with their suppliers, bankers, and other partners.

It's
being used by small upstarts as well. These are companies that we
talked about in the past like Mediafly, a mobile marketing start-up. It's
using dynamic discounting solutions in the cloud to get paid faster,
fund development of new features, and take on new business.

Cone: To follow on with what
Tim said about the broad gamut of usage from company sites and also
earlier mentioning mobile, what we saw in our survey is that mobile is
of great importance to companies as a way of reaching their customers
for internal productivity as well. But reaching customers is actually a
higher priority and that comes down to the old adage: You have to fish
where the fish are.

The cloud is being used to not only accelerate process efficiency and
productivity, but to unlock innovations for all sized companies.

Look
at what Danone is doing when they're setting up direct-to-customer
technologies and marketing. They're going into markets where people
don't necessarily have laptops or landlines. They're leapfrogging that
to a world where people have mobile devices.

So if you
have mobile customers, and as Tim said, think of the consumer
experience, that is how we all live our lives now. No matter what size
your company is, you have to reach your customers the way your customer
lives now -- and that is mobile.

Gardner: So
there's a standardization of process between larger companies and
smaller companies that is much greater now with the cloud. They can all
play off of the same rules when it comes to supply-chain processes or
business interactions as well as marketing and co-marketing.

But
at the other end of the spectrum, you can use a standardized approach
to deliver services out to any mobile endpoint. We're talking about
smart phones today, but we might be talking about sensors or Internet of Things points that are not quite sophisticated as a phone, but are nonetheless
taking data and providing data back.

So, Ed, this all
boils down to greater collaboration, standardized, accepted
collaboration, SMBs with larger ones down to the actual mobile cell
phone or smart phones.
Tell us a little bit about your research, how you have gone about it,
and how that new level of pervasive collaboration was demonstrated in
your findings.

Baseline information

Cone:
In terms of the research, as I said, we went out to 200 execs around
the world and asked them a series of questions about what their
investment plans were. It was baseline survey information. What are you
doing in the cloud, how much of it are you doing, and what are the key
benefits that you're getting?

Then, as we went deeper
in this phase of the project, we found that collaboration has different
meanings. It can be collaboration within the company. It can be with
partners, which cloud platforms allow you to do more easily. It's also
this key relationship, a key area of collaboration between IT and the
business.

What we see in this research is that IT is
increasingly seen as a partner for the business as a way of driving
revenue via the cloud. But across the four regions that we surveyed --
North America, Latin America, EMEA and APAC
-- we saw a very high percentage of companies say that they see that IT
is emerging as a valued partner of the business, not just a support
function for the business. I think that's a key collaborative
relationship that I'm sure our guests are seeing in their own companies.

Gardner:
Just to be clear, Ed, this is ongoing research. You're already back in
the field and you'll be updating some of these findings soon?

We're really interested to see how people are doing compared to the targets they set and what their new targets are.

Cone:
Yes, we're really excited about that, Dana. We did this survey last year for SAP. Then, we jumped in about a year later using those numbers
and did these in-depth research interviews to look at the use of the
cloud to drive business. This summer, we're refielding the survey to see
how things have changed and to see how the view of the future has
changed.

We ask a lot of questions about where they
are now, and where they think they'll be in three years. We're really
interested to see how people are doing compared to the targets they set
and what their new targets are. So we will have some fresh numbers and
fresh reports to talk to you about by Q3 or Q4.

Gardner: Let us look into those actual examples now and go back to Bryan at
TELUS.

Acker: I have a tangible example that might help express the value of
collaboration at TELUS and something that people don't think about, and
that is safety.

We have a lot of field technicians who
are in remote areas, but have mobile access. A perfect example is that
we can go into situation where a technician may be a little unsure of
what to do in a situation and it's potentially unsafe.

Because of the mobile access and the cloud, we've enabled them to quickly record a video, upload it directly to our SAP Jam system,
which is our collaborative tool suite that we use, and share it with a
collection of other technicians, not just the person they can call.

Safer situation

What
happens is then people can say this is unsafe, you need to do X, Y and
Z. We can even push them required training, so they can be sure that
they're making the right decision. All of a sudden, that becomes a safer
situation and the technician is not putting themselves at risk. This is
really important because people do not think of those real, tangible
examples. They often feel that they're just sharing information back and
forth.

But in terms of what we are doing and where we
are going, I sit in HR, and we're trying to improve the business
process. We now have all of our information, the system of record, an
integrated learning management system (LMS), our ability to analyze
talent, so we make the correct hires.

We now trust the
information implicitly and we're able to make the correct decision,
whether it means customer information, recruiting choices, hiring
choices, or performance choices.

Now, we're in a
situation where we're only going to maximize and try to leverage the
cloud for even more innovation, because now people are singing from the
same choir sheet, so to speak.

We now trust the information implicitly and we're able to make the
correct decision, whether it means customer information, recruiting
choices, hiring choices, or performance choices.

We
have access to the same system or record of truth, and that's the first
time we've had that. Now, recruiting can talk to learning, who can talk
to performance, who can talk to technicians and we know they all get a
consistent version of the truth. That is really important for us.

Gardner:
Those are some excellent examples of how mobile enhances cloud. That
extends the value of mobile. That brings in collaboration and, at the
same time, creates data and analysis benefits that can then be fed back
into that process.

So there really is a cyclical
adoption value here. I'd like to go back to the cultural part of this.
Bryan, how do you make sure that that adoption cycle doesn't spin out of
control? Is there a lack of governance? Do you feel like you can
control what goes on, or are we perhaps in the period of creative chaos
that we should let spin off on its own in any way?

Acker:
That’s a great question, and I'm not sure if TELUS handles this in a
unique way, but we definitely had a very detailed plan. The first thing
we did was have collaboration as one of our valued attributes or one of
our leadership competencies. People are expected to collaborate, and
their performance review is dependent on that.

What
that means is we can provide tools to say that we're trying to
facilitate collaboration. It doesn't mean matter if you're collaborating
through a phone call, through a water-cooler chat, or through
technology. Our employees are expected to collaborate. They know that
it’s part of their performance cycle and it’s targeted towards their
achievements for the year. We trust them to do the right thing.

We
actually encourage a little bit of freedom. We want to push the
boundaries. Our governance is not so tight that they are afraid to
comment incorrectly or afraid to ask a tough question.

Flattening the hierarchy

What
we're seeing now is individual team members are challenging leadership
positions on specific questions, and we're having an honest and frank
discussion that’s pushing the organization forward and making us make
the accurate correct choice at all time, which is really encouraging.
Now, we're really flattening our hierarchy and the cloud is enabling us
to do that.

Gardner: That sounds like a very
powerful engine of innovation, allowing that freedom, but then having it
be controlled, managed, and understood at the same time. That’s
amazing. Ed, do you have any reactions to what Bryan just said about how
innovation is manifesting itself newly there at TELUS?

Cone:
When we spoke to TELUS, I was intertested in that cultural aspect of
it. I'm sure the guys on the call would disagree with me on a technical
level, but we like to say that technology is easy, and culture is hard.
The technology works, and you implement it and you figure that out, but
getting people to change is really difficult.

The
example that we use in the case study, SAP on TELUS, was about changing
culture through gamification, allowing people to learn via an online
cloud-based virtual game. It was this massive effort and it engaged a
huge number of employees across this large company.

It really shifted the employee culture, and that had an impact on customer service and therefore on business performance

It
really shifted the employee culture, and that had an impact on customer
service and therefore on business performance. It’s a way that the
cloud is moving mountains and it’s addressing the hard thing to change,
which is human behavior and attitudes.

Bryan talked about how there is a
leveling of the organization, doing away with the traditional
hierarchical command and control, where information is isolated in the
hands of a few, and the new eager employees doesn’t get access to
solving some of the tough problems. All that’s being flattened and
accelerated and powered by cloud and social collaboration tools.

Also,
we're seeing a shift in what constitutes the workforce. One of the
biggest examples is the major shift in how companies are viewing the
workforce. Contingent and statement of work (SOW)
workers, basically non-payroll employees, now represent a third of the
typical workforce. In the next few years, this will grow to more than
half.

It’s already occurring in certain industries,
like pharmaceuticals, mining, retail, and oil and gas. It's changing how
folks view the workforce. They're moving from a functional management
of someone -- this is their job; this is what they do -- to managing
pools of talent or skills that can be rapidly deployed to address a
given problem or develop a new innovative product or service.

These
pools of talent will include both people on your payroll and off your
payroll. Tracking, managing, organizing, and engaging these pools of
talent is only possible through the cloud and through mobile, where
multiple parties from multiple organizations could view, access,
collaborate, and share knowledge and experiences running on a
shared-technology platform.

Customer is evolving

Acker:
That extends quite naturally to the customer. The customer is evolving
faster than almost anything and they expect 24x7 access to support. They
expect authentic responses and they now have access to just as much
information as the customer service agent.

Without
mobile, if you can't connect with those customers and be factual, you're
in trouble. Your customers are going to reply in social-media channels
and in public forums, and you're going to lose business and you're going
to lose trust with your existing customers as well.

Minahan:
I fully agree. The only addition to that is that they also expect to be
able to engage you through any channel, whether it’s their mobile
phone, their laptop, or in some cases, directly face to face, on the
phone, or in a retail outlet and have the same consistent experience and
not need to reintroduce who they are and what their problem as they
move from channel to channel.

Gardner: Clearly we're seeing how things that just
weren’t possible before the cloud are having pervasive impacts on
businesses. Let’s look at a new business example, again with Danone.
Ralf, tell us a little bit about how cloud has had strategic
implications for you. You have many brands, many lines of business. How
is cloud allowing Danone to function better as a whole?

The cloud is definitely the best option for us to start these new businesses and connect to all consumers.

Steinbach:
We have a strategy around digital marketing and, as you know, we're
operating in almost every country in the world. Even though we're a big
company, locally, we're sometimes quite small. We're trying to build up
new markets in emerging countries with very small investments in the
beginning. There, the cloud is definitely the best option for us to
start these new businesses and connect to all consumers.

Money
matters, even for a big company like Danone. That’s very important for
us. If you look at Africa, there are completely different business
models that we need to address.

People in Africa pay
with their mobile phones. Some sell yogurt on a bicycle. Women pick up
some yogurt in the morning and then they sell them on the road. We need
to do businesses with these people as well. Obviously, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system isn't able to do that, but the cloud is a much better adapted platform to do this sort of business.

Gardner:
Again, instances where cloud is enabling things that simply couldn’t
have been done with spreadsheets, email ,and sticky notes. So very
interesting. Now, it’s one thing to look at the impacts of cloud, and
we've certainly demonstrated that there are new benefits and that
provides a challenge.

Ed, how do you compare doing
something that's never been done before to something in the past that
therefore create a metric of success to measure what you're doing? Is
there anything in your research so far that helps organizations
understand the value of cloud, some of these instances that we’ve been
talking about that put into business terms. The C-suite likes to look at
numbers. How do we measure innovation?

Metrics lacking

Cone:
We're doing some research on another program right now on that very
topic for a non-SAP program. That is showing us that metrics for success
on basic things like key performance indicators (KPIs) for progress of migration into the cloud are lacking at a lot of companies. Basic return on investment (ROI) numbers are lacking at a lot of companies.

We're
really old school. To go back to your definition of what a business is,
we think it’s an organization that’s set up to make money for
shareholders and deliver value for stakeholders. By those measures, at
least by dotted line, the key metrics are your financial performance?
Are you entering, as we mentioned before, new markets and creating new
products?

So the metrics we're seeing that are cloud
specific aren't universal yet. In a broader sense, as cloud becomes an
everyday set of tools, the point of those tools is to make the business
run better, and we are seeing a correlation between effective use of the
cloud and business performance.

Gardner: Tim, any thoughts on measuring innovation, qualifying and
quantifying it? Isn't data analytics a new currency that we need to
bring to the table when we think about the fruits of doing this kind of
elaboration.

There are entirely new engagement models and business models that the companies hadn’t even thought of before.

Minahan:
Certainly. What the cloud, mobile, and social bring to bear in addition
to new collaboration models is that they kick off an unbelievable
amount of new information, and oftentimes not in a structured way.
There's a need to aggregate that information and analyze that in new
ways to detect and predict propensity modeling on your customers, your
supply chain, and your employees. Progression and development are
extremely powerful.

I think we’ve just scratched the
surface. As an industry, we provided the channels through which to
collaborate, as we heard today. There are entirely new engagement models
and business models that the companies hadn’t even thought of before.
Once you have that information, once you have that connectivity, once
you have that collaboration, you can begin to investigate and trial and
error.

To answer your question about measurement on
this, yes, we need measurement of the business process and the business
outcome. Let’s not forget why companies adopt technology. It’s not just
for technology sake. It’s to effect the change. It’s to effect more
efficiency, greater productivity, and new engagement capabilities.

Measuring
the business benefit is what we're seeing and what we’re advising our
customers to do. And rather than just measuring, are we tracking towards
an adoption of having more cloud in our infrastructure portfolios.

The
focus today is largely driven by the fact that the lines of business
are now more engaged in the buying decision and in shaping what they
want from a technology standpoint to help them enable their business
process. So the metrics have shifted from one of speeds and feeds and
users to one of business outcomes.

Gardner:
Bryan at TELUS in Toronto, you're closely associated with the human
resources productivity and the softer metrics of the employee
involvement and dedication that sort of thing. Are there any ways that
you can think of that cloud adoption and innovation, as we’ve been
describing, has this unintended set of consequences when it comes to
employee empowerment or that innovation equation? How do you view
measuring success of cloud adoption?

Simplifying the process

Acker:
To echo what’s already have been said, we've actually tried to simplify
the process as well. We’re not really concerned with how many users are
using the tool or how many conversations are happening. We measure our
customers success by the likelihood to recommend. Will a TELUS customer
recommend our services and products to friends, family, and peers?

We
measure internal success by our employee engagement metric. If the
customers are satisfied and the employees are engaged and fulfilled at
work, that means that we're probably moving in the right direction. We
can kind of reverse engineer to see what changes are helping us. That
allows us to take our information and innovation from the cloud and
inspire better behaviors and better process.

We can
say, "You know what, in this pocket we’ve analyzed that our customers
are likely to recommend it higher than anywhere else in Canada. What are
they doing?" We can look back through the information shared on the
cloud and see the great customer success stories or the great team
building that’s driving engagement through the roof.

We
can say, "This is the process we have to replicate and spread
throughout all of our centers." Then, we can tweak it for cultural
specifics. But because of that, we can use the cloud to inspire better
behavior, not just say that we had 40,000 users and 2,000 hits on this
blog post. We're really trying to get away from the quantitative and get
into the qualitative to drive change throughout the organization.

Gardner:
We're reaching the end of our time. I want to look a bit to the future.
What comes next? You can certainly make the argument that cloud
adoption as an IT function has been in effect for some years now and is
moving into maturity. But I think we can safely say as well that the
business exploitation of cloud models and effects is still rather new
and fresh.

And last but not least, it's about security. We take that really seriously.

So
we're still in an uncharted territory, and trying to think about where
this takes us next is interesting and exciting. Let’s start with Ralf.
Where do you see the impacts of cloud adoption in your business over the
next couple of years? What’s likely to take place there that you can
already start to see the glimmers of, the initial parts of?

Steinbach:
There are still some challenges in front of us. One of the challenges
is China. China is one of the biggest markets, but cloud services are
not always available or they're very slow. If your cloud solution is
hosted outside of China, there's a big problem. These are probably
technical challenges, but we have to find solutions with our partners
there, so that they can establish their services in China.

That’s
one of the challenges. The other is that that the cloud might change
the role of IT in our organization. In the past we owned the systems and
the applications. Today, the business can basically buy cloud services
with a credit card. So you could imagine that they won’t need us anymore
in the future, but that's not true.

As an IT
organization, we probably have to find our role inside the organization,
from just providing solutions or hardware to being an ambassador for
the business and to help them to make the right decisions. There are
still problems that will remain as the integration between different
applications. It doesn’t get easier in the cloud, so that’s where I see
the challenge.

And last but not least, it's about
security. We take that really seriously. If we store data, whether it's
employees or of our consumers, we have to make sure that that our cloud
providers have the same standards of security and there are no leaks.
That’s very, very important for us. And there are legal aspects as well.

We've just started. There are still a lot of things
to do in the next few years, but we're definitely going on with our
strategy towards the cloud and toward mobile. And, at the end of the
day, it all fits together. I think it was said before that it's not only
cloud, but it's the big data, collaboration, and mobile. You have to
see the whole thing as one package of opportunities.

Important challenges

Gardner:
Thank you, Ralf, for bringing us a bit back down to earth, when it
comes to cloud. We can certainly see the benefits, but there are still a
lot of important challenges to overcome along the way as well. Bryan at
TELUS, how do you see things unfolding? What do you think might be some
of the impacts a few years from now that we're only just starting to
realize?

Acker: On a more positive note, which
is just the other side of the coin, obviously the challenges are there,
but we're actually just starting to be able to experience the fact that
innovation at TELUS is moving faster than it used to. We're no longer
dependent on the speed at which our pre-assigned resources can make
change and develop new products.

IT can now look at it
from a more strategic point of view, which is great. Now, we're
maximizing quarterly releases from systems that are leveraging the input
from multiple companies around the world, not just how fast our
learning team can develop something or how fast our IT team can build
new functionality into our products.

We're no longer
limited by the resources, and innovation is flying forward. That, for
us, is the biggest unexpected gain. We're seeing all this technology
that used to take months or years to change now on a quarterly release
schedule. This is fantastic. Even within a year of being on our
cloud-computing system, we're so happy, and that is inspiring to people.
They're maximizing that and trying to push the organization forward as
well. So, that’s a real big benefit.

Gardner:
Tim Minahan, at SAP you have a unique vantage point, looking at many
different aspects of business technology and cloud. Do you have any
thoughts about where this can lead us in the next few years that we
haven’t yet hit upon, things you're just starting to see the first
really glimmers of it?

I think the biggest thing is that the cloud is going to unlock new business models and new organization models.

Minahan:
A lot of it has been touched on here. We're seeing a massive shift in
what the role of IT is, moving from one of deploying technology and
integrating things to really becoming business process experts.

We
talked a bit about the amount of data and the insights that are now
available to help you better understand and predict the appetites of
your customers to help you even determine when your machines might fail
and when it's time to reorder or set a service repair.

I
think the biggest thing is that the cloud is going to unlock new
business models and new organization models. We talked a bit about TELUS
and their work patterns, in which most of the workers are remote and
how they are engaging the field service technicians in the field.

We
talked about the growing contingent workforce and how the cloud is
enabling folks to collaborate, onboard, and skill up those employees,
non-payroll employees much more quickly. We're going to see your new
virtual enterprises. We're talking about borderless enterprises that
allow you to organize not just pools of talent, but entire value chains,
and be able to collaborate in a more much transparent way.

We
mentioned before about Apple Home. You're beginning to see it with 3D
printers. It's this whole idea where more and more companies become
digital businesses. This isn’t just about on-the-channel commerce
providing a single customer experience across multiple channels.

It's
actually about moving more and more of what you deliver, the solutions
you deliver, the former products your deliver, to digital bits that can
be tested, experienced, and downloaded all online.

All of this is being empowered by this massive convergence of cloud, mobility, social and business networks, and big data.

What comes next

Gardner:
Last word to you, Ed Cone. Any thoughts about what comes next, something that could
not have been done before these cloud models emerged.

Cone:
To follow on what Tim said about the borderless enterprise, when we ask
people what’s in the cloud now and what’s going to be substantially
cloud based in three years, three of the highest growth areas were
innovation in R and D, supply chain, and HR. All of those go straight to
this idea that boundaryless digital enterprises are emerging and that
cloud will be the underpinning of these enterprises.

We're
working with Tim right now on a big global study about the workforce.
When I talk about culture and the way companies function internally, a
year ago, when we started this research, HR was the least likely
function of the ones we queried to be in the cloud, and it's going to
have massive growth in the next couple of years.

These stories start to converge of boundaryless and culture, all coming together via the cloud.

These
stories start to converge of boundaryless and culture, all coming
together via the cloud. That’s the segue to say that we're really
excited to see how these numbers look when we refield this survey this
summer, because that progress is snowballing and accelerating beyond
even what people thought it was the last time we asked them.

Gardner:
We’ll look forward to seeing that research and discussing it the next
time we get together. I appreciate that. I am afraid we will have to
leave it there.

You've been listening to a sponsored
BriefingsDirect podcast discussion on the expanding impact that cloud
computing is having at the strategic business level and not just as an
IT efficiency shift. And we’ve heard how companies like TELUS and Danone
are gaining refocused stability to extend processes and insights
broadly and affordably to their customers, suppliers and other partners
inside and outside of their organization.

So, please
join me now in thanking our guests, Ed Cone, Managing Editor of Thought
Leadership at Oxford Economics; Ralf Steinbach, the Director of Global
Software Architecture at Groupe Danone, the French food multinational in
Paris; Bryan Acker, Cultural Change Ambassador for
TELUS Transformation office at TELUS, the Canadian Telecom firm based
in Toronto, and Tim Minahan, Chief Marketing Officer for SAP Cloud and Line of Business Solutions.

And a big thanks lastly to our audience for joining us. This is Dana
Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Don’t forget to come
back next time to BriefingsDirect.

Once
again, we’re focusing on how companies are adapting to the new style
of IT to improve IT performance and deliver better user experiences,
and business results. This time, we’re coming to you directly from the
recent HP Discover 2013 Conference in Barcelona.

We’re here to learn directly from IT and business leaders alike how big data, mobile, and cloud -- along with converged infrastructure -- are all supporting their goals.

Gardner:
So tell us a bit about what you do at Systems Mechanics. It
sounds like a very interesting organization. You've been doing a lot
with data, and monetizing that in some very compelling ways.

Stubley:
Yes, indeed. System Mechanics is a UK-based organization. We’re
principally a consultancy and a software developer. We’ve been working
in the telco space for the last 10-15 years. We also have a history in retail and financial services.

Stubley

The focus we've had recently and the products we’ve developed into our Zen family
are based on big data, particularly in telcos, as they evolve from
principally old analog conversations into devices where people have smartphone applications and data becomes ever more important.

All
that data and all those people connected to the network cause a lot
more events that need to be managed, and that data is both a cost to the
business and an opportunity to optimize the business. So we have a cost
reduction we apply and a revenue upside we apply as well.

Quick example

Gardner:
Can you give us a quick example, just so our listeners who might not be
familiar with all of these technical terms and instances of use would
understand? What’s a typical way a telco will use Zen, and what would
they do with it?

Stubley: For a typical way,
let’s take a scenario where you’re looking in network and you can’t make
a phone call. Two major systems are catching that information. One is a
fault-management system that’s telling you there is a fault on the network and it reports that back to the telecom itself.

The second one is the performance management
system. That doesn’t specify faults basically, but it tells you if
you’re having things like thresholds being affected, which may have an
impact on performance every time. Either of those can have an impact on
your customer, and from a customer’s perspective, you might also be
having a problem with the network that isn’t reported by either of the
systems.

We’re finding that social media
is getting a bigger play in this space. Why is that? Now, particular
the younger populations with consumer-based telcos, mobile telcos
particularly, if they can’t get a signal or they can’t make a phone
call, they get onto social media and they are trashing the brand.

They’re
making noise. A trend is combining fault management and performance
management, which are logical partners with social media. All of a
sudden, rather than having a couple of systems, you have three.

In
our world, we can put 25 or 30 different data sources on to a single
Zen platform. In fact, there is no theoretical limit to the number we
could, but 20 to 30 is quite typical now. That enables us to manage all
the different network elements, different types of mobile technologies, LTE, 3G, and 2G. It could be Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei, ZTE, or Alcatel-Lucent.
There is an amazing range of equipment, all currently managed through
separate entities. We’re offering a platform to pull it all together in
one unit.

The other way I tend to look at it is that
we’re trying to turn the telcos into how you might view a human. We take
the humans as the best decision-making platforms in the world and we
probably still could claim that. As humans, we have conscious and
unconscious processes running. We don’t think about breathing or pumping
our blood around our system, but it’s happening all the time.

We use a solution with visualization, because in the world of big data, you can’t understand data in numbers.

We
have senses that are pulling in massive amount of information from the
outside world. You’re listening to me now. You’re probably doing a bunch
of other things while you are tapping away on a table as well. They’re
getting senses of information there and you are seeing, and hearing, and
feeling, and touching, and tasting.

Those all contain
information that’s coming into the body, but most of the activity is
subconscious. In the world of big data, this is the Zen goal, and what
we’re delivering in a number of places is to make as many actions as
possible in a telco environment, as in a network environment, come to
that automatic, subconscious state.

Suppose I have a
problem on a network. I relate it back to the people who need to know,
but I don’t require human intervention. We’re looking a position where
the human intervention is looking at patterns in that information to
decide what they can do intellectually to make the business better.

That
probably speaks to another point here. We use a solution with visualization, because in the world of big data, you can’t understand
data in numbers. Your human brain isn’t capable of processing enough,
but it is capable of identifying patterns of pictures, and that’s where
we go with our visualization technology.

Gather and use data

Gardner:
So your clients are able to take massive amounts of data and new types
of data from a variety of different sources. Rather than be overwhelmed
by that, through this analogy to being subconscious, you’re able to
gather and use it.

But when something does present a
point of information that’s important, you can visualize that and bring
that to their attention. It’s a nice way of being the right mix of
intelligence, but not overwhelming levels of data.

Stubley: Let me give you an example of that. We’ve got one customer who is one of the largest telcos in EMEA.
They’re basically taking in 90,000 alarms from the network a day, and
that’s their subsidiary companies, all into one environment. But 90,000
alarms needing manual intervention is a very big number.

Using
the Zen technology, we’ve been able to reduce that to 10,000 alarms.
We’ve effectively taken 90 percent of the manual processing out of that
environment. Now, 10,000 is still a lot of alarms to deal with, but it’s
a lot less frightening than 90,000, and that’s a real impact in human
terms.

Gardner: Very good. Now that we
understand a bit about what you do, let’s get into how you do it. What’s
beneath the covers in your Zen system that allows you to confidently
say we can take any volume of data we want?

If we need more processing power, we can add more services to scale
transparently. That enables us to get any amount of data, which we can
then process.

Stubley: Fundamentally, that comes down to the architecture we built for Zen. The first element is our data-integration
layer. We have a technology that we developed over the last 10 years
specifically to capture data in telco networks. It’s real-time and
rugged and it can deal with any volume. That enables us to take anything
from the network and push it into our real-time database, which is HP’s
Vertica solution, part of the HP HAVEn family.

Vertica
analysis is to basically record any amount of data in real time and
scale automatically on the HP hardware platform we also use. If we need more
processing power, we can add more services to scale transparently. That
enables us to get any amount of data, which we can then process.

We
have two processing layers. Referring to our earlier discussion about
conscious and subconscious activity, our conscious activity is
visualizing that data, and that’s done with Tableau.

We
have a number of Tableau reports and dashboards with each of our
product solutions. That enables us to envision what’s happening and
allows the organization, the guys running the network, and the guys
looking at different elements in the data to make their own decisions
and identify what they might do.

We also have a
streaming analytics engine that listens to the data as it comes into the
system before it goes to Vertica. If we spot the patterns we’ve
identified earlier “subconsciously,” we’ll then act on that data, which
may be reducing an alarm count. It may be "actioning" something.

It
may be sending someone an email. It may be creating a trouble ticket on
a different system. Those all happen transparently and automatically.
It’s four layers simplifying the solution: data capture, data
integration, visualization, and automatic analytics.

Developing high value

Gardner:
And when you have the confidence to scale your underlying architecture
and infrastructure, when you are able to visualize and develop high
value to a vertical industry like a telco, this allows you to then
expand into more lines of business in terms of products and services and
also expand into move vertical. Where have you taken this in terms of
the Zen family and then where do you take this now in terms of your
market opportunity?

Stubley: We focus on mobile
telcos. That’s our heritage. We can take any data source from a telco,
but we can actually take any data source from anywhere, in any platform
and any company. That ranges from binary to HTML. You name it, and if you’ve got data, we could load it.

That
means we can build our processing accordingly. What we do is position
what we call solution packs, and a solution pack is a connector to the
outside world, to the network, and it grabs the data. We’ve got an
element of data modeling
there, so we can load the data into Vertica. Then, we have already
built reports in Tableau that allows us to interrogate automatically.
That’s at a component level.

Once you go to a number of
components, we can then look horizontally across those different items
and look at the behaviors that interact with each other. If you are
looking at pure telco terms, we would be looking at different network
devices, the end-to-end performance of the network, but the same would
apply to a fraud scenario or could apply to someone who is running cable
TV.

The very highest level is finding what problem you’re going to solve and then using the data to solve it.

So
multi-play players are interesting because they want to monitor what’s
happening with TV as well and that will fit in exactly in the same
category. Realistically, anybody with high-volume, real-time data can
take benefit from Vertica.

Another interesting play in
this scenario is social gaming and online advertising. They all have
similar data characteristics, very high volume and fixed data that needs
to be analyzed and processed automatically.

Gardner:
We have quite a few other organizations that are exploring how to use
the available technologies to gather and exploit data. Are there any
lessons learned, any hindsight perspectives you can provide as other
organizations, whether they’re using their own technology or using
third-parties or some combination, what should you keep in mind as you
begin this journey?

Stubley: A lot of the
lessons have been learned time-and-time again. Frequently, people fall
into the same traps over-and-over again. Insanity is not learning from
previous mistakes, isn’t it? What we see most often, particularly in the
big-data world, and I see this in a number of different forms, is when
people are looking for the data to be the solution, rather than solving
the business problem.

The very highest level is finding
what problem you’re going to solve and then using the data to solve it.
You won’t identify the problems just with big data itself. It’s too big
a problem and it’s irrational, if you think about it.

One
of the great things we have is that a number of solutions that sit on a
big data enable you to make a starting point and then step, in small
steps, to a big data solution that is more encompassing, but proven at
every stage of the way. It’s a very classic project behavior with proof
at every point, delivery at every point, value at every point. But
please, please don’t think big data is the answer.

Why Vertica?

Gardner:
One last question delving into the process by which you’ve crafted your
architecture and capabilities. How
long have you been using Vertica, and what is it that drove you to using
it vis-à-vis alternatives?

Stubley: As far as the Zen family goes, we have used other technologies in the past, other relational databases,
but we’ve used Vertica now for more than two-and-a-half years. We were looking
for a platform that can scale and would give us real-time data. At the
volumes we were looking at nothing could compete with Vertica at a
sensible price. You can build yourself any solid solution with enough
money, but we haven’t got too many customers who are prepared to make
that investment.

So Vertica fits in with the technology
of the 21st century. A lot of the relational database appliances are
using 1980 thought processes. What’s happened with processing in the
last few years is that nobody shares memory anymore, and our environment
requires a non-shared memory solution. Vertica has been built on that
basis. It was scaled without limit.

Gardner: And as you mentioned, Andy, Vertica is part of the HAVEn family and Hadoop,
Autonomy, and other security aspects and compliance aspects are in
there as well. How do you view things going forward, as more types and
volumes of data are involved?

Vertica fits in with the technology of the 21st century. A lot of the
relational database appliances are using 1980 thought processes.

You’re
still trying to increase your value and reduce that time to delivery
for the analysis. Any thoughts about what other aspects of HAVEn might
fit well into your organization?

Stubley: One of
the areas we’re looking at that I mentioned earlier was social media.
Social media is a very natural play for Hadoop, and Hadoop is clearly a
very cost-effective platform for vast volumes of data at real-time data
load, but very slow to analyze.

So the combination with
a high-volume, low-cost platform for the bulk of data and a very high
performing real-time analytics engine is very compelling. The challenge
is going to be moving the data between the two environments. That isn’t
going to go away. That’s not simple, and there is a number of
approaches. HP Vertica is taking some.

There is Flex Zone,
and there are any number of other players in that space. The reality is
that you probably reach an environment where people are parallel
loading the Hadoop and the Vertica. That’s what we probably plan to do.
That gives you much more resilience. So for a lot of the data we’re
putting into our system, we’re actually planning to put the raw data
files into Hadoop, so we can reload them as necessary to improve the
resilience of the overall system too.

Gardner:
Well good luck with that. I hope perhaps we can hear more about that in
the next HP Discover event, but I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there
for this particular venue. I’d like to thank our guest, Andy Stubley, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at
Systems Mechanics Limited, based in London. Thank you so much, Andy.

Stubley: Thank you very much.

Gardner:
And a big thank you to our audience, as well, for joining us in this
special new style of IT discussion coming to you directly from the HP
Discover 2013 Conference in Barcelona. I’m Dana
Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this
ongoing series of HP sponsored discussions. Thanks again for listening,
and do come back next time.

Transcript
of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on making telcos more responsive
to customer and operators by using big-data tools and analysis.
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